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VISUAL CENTURY

South African Art in Context

Thembinkosi Goniwe
Mario Pissarra
volume four Mandisi Majavu
1990 - 2007 editors
VISUAL CENTURY
South African Art in Context

Volume 4  1990–2007 
Edited by Thembinkosi Goniwe, Mario Pissarra and Mandisi Majavu
Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press and The Visual Century project


1 Jan Smuts Avenue Gavin Jantjes, director
Johannesburg 2001 Camille Collettsvei 2
South Africa Oslo 0258
http://witspress.co.za Norway
Jantjes@me.com

First published 2011

ISBN:
Four volume boxed set: 978 1 86814 547 8
Volume 1: 978 1 86814 524 9
Volume 2: 978 1 86814 525 6
Volume 3: 978 1 86814 526 3
Volume 4: 978 1 86814 527 0

Entire publication © Wits University Press and the Visual Century project 2011
Text © ASAI (Africa South Art Initiative) 2011
Chapters © Individual authors 2011
Images © Individual copyright holders 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a


retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers,
except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.

All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge
the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced in captions for the use of images. Every
effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced here;
please contact Wits University Press at the above address in case of any omissions or errors.

Project initiator and director: Gavin Jantjes


Editor in chief: Mario Pissarra
Volume 1 edited by Jillian Carman
Volume 2 edited by Lize van Robbroeck
Volume 3 edited by Mario Pissarra
Volume 4 edited by Thembinkosi Goniwe, Mario Pissarra and Mandisi Majavu
Project management by ASAI (Africa South Art Initiative)

Text editing and production management by Helen Moffett


Typesetting by Arthur Attwell, Electric Book Works
Proofreading by Ethné Clark and Dave Buchanan
Indexing by Ethné Clarke
Picture research by Patricia Rademeyer and Sarie Potter

Set in The Sans from LucasFonts (lucasfonts.com)


The Visual Century publication would not have been possible without the generous
support of the Department of Arts and Culture, Republic of South Africa; the Foundation
for Arts Initiatives; the Africa South Art Initiative and the Strategic Planning Division of the
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Contents

vi PREFACE
x FOREWORD
Sarat Maharaj
Introduction
2 CHARTING PATHWAYS IN AN ERA OF POSTS
Mandisi Majavu and Mario Pissarra
Chapter one
20 GREAT EXPECTATIONS
A view from Europe
Gavin Jantjes
Chapter two
46 IN HUMAN HISTORY
Pasts and prospects in South African art today
Colin Richards
Chapter three
74 INTIMACY AND HISTORY
The art of difference and identity in South Africa
Gabeba Baderoon
Chapter four
92 RE-PRESENTING THE BODY
In search of a postcolonial moment
Mgcineni Sobopha
Chapter five
118 THE EXPERIMENTAL TURN IN THE VISUAL ARTS
Kathryn Smith
Chapter six
152 PUBLIC ART PROJECTS IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
Visual culture, creative spaces and postcolonial geographies
Zayd Minty
Chapter seven
176 IMAGINED FUTURES
Some new trends in South African art
Andries Oliphant
194 TIMELINES 1990–2007
212 CONTRIBUTORS
214 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
217 INDEX
vi VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Preface
It is often said that national liberation is based on the right of every people to
freely control their own destiny and that the objective of this liberation is national
independence … the basis of national liberation is the inalienable right of every
people to have their own history (Amilcar Cabral 1966).

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is
because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any
true artist, makes them aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I
see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than
full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture,
society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must
never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth (President
John F. Kennedy 1963).

Nearly two decades after the fall of apartheid, these quotations from the revolutionary
leader Amilcar Cabral and President John F. Kennedy have lost none of their relevance for
South Africans. In the era of decolonisation, Cabral stressed the importance of history for
the once colonised people of Africa, and Kennedy elevated the role of artists in the United
States and elsewhere.

Even though these leaders came from vastly different backgrounds, their words register
a common concern for culture. They highlight the value of history to the construction of
a national identity, and the role of the artist within culture. They reveal why so much of
South Africa’s visual art, music, literature and theatre, is inextricably linked to the desire
for liberty and equality. The notions of culture of the colonial regime and the apartheid
government valued neither South African art nor its artists. British colonial culture saw
little value in anything other than its own reflection, and the apartheid regime excluded
black artists from any role in interpreting the nation’s art history.

Works of art can articulate particular moments in the life of a nation. Not all South Africa’s
visual artists had the liberty, the means or the will to connect their work to the politics
of national liberation, or to hold a critical light up to their nation’s moral potential. But
those artists whose work did make these statements have become actors in the making of
history, and their work is testimony to historical progress. Whether a rock painting, a wood
sculpture or a video projection, such works have provided insights into how South Africans
view themselves in their social and cultural environments.

The task of the Visual Century project has been to grapple with the uneven flow of South
African contemporary art; to contextualise the relevance of artists and their works to the
nation’s cultural identity and, where possible, to place them in relation to the history of
international art. Providing a balanced record of the never-ending production of art is a
difficult yet vital task in contemporary South African culture. The constant creation of
images and re-formulation of artistic concepts make art history a fluid body of facts and
ideas. Art historical writing becomes a topological exercise similar to mapping a river.

One can picture the history of South Africa’s art as a river meandering through the
southernmost part of the African continent, growing in stature as it glides towards the
estuary of the present. It connects to the history of the world’s art just as rivers inevitably
connect to the great oceans of our planet. In the twentieth century, some tributaries of this
P re f ace
  vii

waterway have been navigated by historians, and the records of their journeys have helped
the editors and writers of Visual Century to determine where the river has flowed, and
what has shaped its momentum and direction. But these early records also make it clear
that one cannot know this river with any degree of certainty. Even with the most rigorous
research, its topology remains sketchy. Theories as to its origins and what has dissolved
into its stream will constantly change. To understand what commands its direction or
progression will continue to challenge the historians mapping it. In a postmodern age,
we have begun to accept that there are plural narratives of art history, and that all history
writing remains incomplete. Over time, we might trace new tributaries or re-evaluate the
contribution of individual artists to its flow. But the true temporal and spatial parameters
of the river remain elusive.

Visual Century is the latest contextual survey of the river’s bed, channels and sedimentary
traces. The intention is to take you, the reader, along this lengthy waterway, and to leave you
with an imminent sense of arrival in a different time and place. If the limited page extent
of its volumes, gaps in research or simple oversight should distract from this historical
journey, I hope that it will none the less offer more novel insights about art practice in
South Africa than anything that has gone before.

The harsh political circumstances of twentieth-century colonial, Union and apartheid


rule often eroded facts and shaped cultural fictions. The interpretation of art history was
forced into narrow channels conforming to even narrower cultural perceptions. It divided
achievement along racial lines, and restricted critical engagement with the wellspring of
ideas from other African cultures. The challenge facing the writers in each volume of Visual
Century was not to only immerse readers in the turbulence of the river, but also to expose
some of what lies hidden in the sediment.

The revision of the river’s tributaries, started by South African historians in the 1980s and
continued after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, made it necessary to
review a century of contemporary art. The predominance of Eurocentric art history in the
teaching and discourses of art within South Africa also needed to be addressed so that a
more accurate and layered map could be drawn. With the support of Z. Pallo Jordan, then
the Minister of Arts and Culture, the Visual Century project was born at the end of 2006,
with research beginning a year later.

The century under review begins in 1907, which marks the year the British restored self-
governance to the Boer Republics after defeating them in the Second South African
War. This in turn led to the establishment of the Union of South Africa (1910) that joined
Afrikaner and British settlers under one government. The year 1907 also coincides with the
epoch in which artists in Europe broke with prevailing conventions by assimilating African
and other cultures into their practice to create European Modernism. Pablo Picasso’s Les
demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is one of the striking examples of this fissure, alongside Henri
Matisse’s Dance (1907), which references the art of Asia and the Arab world.

The research for Visual Century took existing and new material and located these in the
context of South African social history and international art history. The prominent themes
that emerged from initial research prompted the division of the book into four volumes.
The volumes have an open structure that avoids a single author narrative. Numerous
writers were invited to interpret these themes and, where possible, to redress the racial
and gender imbalance of colonial and apartheid art histories. This approach matched
the spirit of the project’s intentions, which recognised that there are plural narratives of
viii VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Nicholas Hlobo: Umthubi, 2006. Exotic


and indigenous wood, steel, wire,
ribbon, rubber inner tube, 200 × 400 ×
730 cm (variable). Private collection,
Johannesburg.
P re f ace
  ix

history. It allowed writers to retrieve the history of South African art from the political
doctrines of colonialism and apartheid, and to uncover its essential African character.
By avoiding a strict linear narrative, the information gathered does not claim to be finite
or absolute. There are overlaps at the start and end of volumes. Occasionally this open
structure creates coincidences of ideas across volumes and different readings of certain
artists whose practice extends across eras. But the multiplicity of voices keeps the project
open-minded about the scope and dimensions of the river of history, and the need to
review who contributed what to South Africa’s art history.

Any text about art only creates new meaning through engagement and comment. The
editors and I hope that the chapters in this overview will be seen as an invitation to further
scholarly research. The nature of mapping something fluid is that certain issues and artists
inevitably rise to the surface, while others sink. To broaden and deepen our knowledge of
this river beyond what is revealed in these four volumes, South Africa’s visual art history
must be constantly reviewed.

Gavin Jantjes
Visual Century project director
Oslo, 2011

References
Cabral, Amilcar. 1966. “The weapon of theory: Address delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference
of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana in January 1966.” http://
wwwmarxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm.
Kennedy, President John F. 1963. “Remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963.” Online: National
Endowment for the Arts http://arts.endow.gov/about/Kennedy.html.
x VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Foreword
How to chart the historic passage out of apartheid to the South Africa taking shape in its
wake today? What see-think-know modes can we muster? What conceptual tackle? This
fourth volume of Visual Century has us pondering such queries even if it does not broach
them for their own sake. How to speak from within the image’s surging force, whether it is
from the art or media world or humdrum everyday life? Are visual images truer to the raw
events they embody than abstract words and language? A core question has us tussling
with how ‘thinking through the visual’ might work: can it prise open a critical chink in the
post-Gutenberg age of spectacle, where the look of things casts a pervasive spell over how
we see and experience the world?

At one pole, the Visual Century project is about knowledge production through art practice:
this takes in both hard-nosed know-how and, to coin a Samuel Beckett term, the vagaries
of “no-how”. At the other pole, it is a process of translation – putting into words what
artworks, activities and visual representations tell us about the historic passage out of
apartheid and South Africa making itself anew. It is about figuring the drift of images in
linguistic terms. We are in the rub-up of the visual and verbal. They are both at one with
each other and also at odds, if not quite at loggerheads. Each has its doggedly different
drive, although they tally broadly to tell the tale at hand. Nevertheless, what words and
language say about images amounts to more than – and less than – what is teeming in
the visual material itself. There is an intrinsic teeter between them, a relationship that
fluctuates between a sense of surplus and shortfall.

Why is this vital? Because it forestalls a rendering of the South Africa story as a closed,
definitive scenario. Visual Century could easily lapse into a representation of the “passage
through apartheid to the rainbow state and beyond” as a cumulative account of dialectical
advance. However, the oscillating swell and dip between verbal and visual components
staves off a lock-tight, seamless representation. It opens things up, making room for
uncertainty and discontinuities, for unforeseen elements. The diverse stances and
saliences that make up the fourth volume of Visual Century seem, wittingly or otherwise,
to mime this overall disposition. The intrinsic teeter between the ongoing visual-verbal
play-off sparks an epistemic gear peculiar to thinking through the visual. We might grasp
it in both its senses: thinking by means of the visual, via its sticky thickness, its opacities;
and unpacking its processes to scan its innards, as it were.

Why is the verbal-visual wobbling pivot a signal element here? Because it mirrors more
faithfully the ups and downs, the detours in the “long walk to freedom” (to borrow a phrase
from Nelson Mandela). This means that the hurly-burly of the South Africa story unfolds as
an assemblage of motley soundings and dissonant voicings, which cut across and translate
into one another, rather than as a monolithic, triumphalist descant. It adds up to a more
toned and tempered account, shot through with quavers, caveats and bittersweetness of
the sort we are more likely to find in Marlene van Niekerk’s post-apartheid novel Triomf.
Dare we discern in this structure of disequilibrium the outlines of an argumentative, open-
ended multiplicity of South Africa-in-the-world to come?

At odds with the above, quite another sort of South Africa-in the-world scenario is staged in
the photograph on page xi. It is an image of Professor C.L.’s office at the University College
for Indians, Salisbury Island, Durban. It is also the Art History room in which I studied in
the 1970s. A Breughel on the far back wall cites the North European tradition of retinal
painting. Through the window, a railway line that delivered wagonloads of prisoners to
F o re w o r  d xi

Art History Room, Salisbury Island,


Durban c. 1971, University of South
Africa, University College for Indians.
Photograph. Documentation Centre:
Van Niekerk Collection at University
of Durban-Westville for Indians (now
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban).

and from the shipping docks is visible. On the blackboard ledge, an Islamic calligraphic
strip in angular Kufic; an Aztec head; an elongated Makonde wood figurine; a Buddha
head; prehistoric South Africa cheek by jowl with contemporary Zulu, Ndebele and Xhosa
craft; a Walter Battiss print; a Rorke’s Drift weave. The room is an art-culture-clan tableau
from six continents, an epistemic-classificatory contraption. The Greco-Roman-Hellenistic
bust seems to preside as the Eurocentric radial point around which an array of cultures
revolves – some less superseded, more equal than others.

Was the scene –  ostensibly a PR job – inscribed with ambivalence from the start, or is
this something that creeps in with hindsight? A resistant spark that stares us in the
face, and to which we are initially blind, is a quotation on the blackboard from Rukmini
Devi’s cosmic universalism. By performing the ancient temple dance in public during
India’s independence struggle, she defied both British colonial and Islamic authority over
the native, gendered, racial body – as well as Victorian taboos that Indians themselves
had imbibed in becoming ashamed of the dance’s sensual-erotic aesthetic. But beyond
this, the intrinsic teeter of the verbal-visual runs amuck with the dogma of race-culture
separation the photograph sought to dramatise. The swirl of artefacts, art languages,
idioms and modes charges the scene with a sense of runaway translation, cultural swap,
mix and pidginisation, of cross-talk and chat between disparate, dissimilar elements. The
sense of an incipient dirty cosmopolitanism from below is stirred up.

What of visual representation in relation to nation-building? asks Visual Century


somewhat gingerly. Various stabs at putting visual art in the service of some or other
idea – revolution, nation, unconscious, proletariat, the utopian and the like – have each
given cause for consternation. Marcel Duchamp’s qualms before such pre-givens led him
to suggest that we might affirm art simply in ‘the service of the mind’ – as the open-
ended drift of knowledge creation. Historical experience across the century has left us
xii VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

wary of the very idea of nation. In the name of ‘who belongs?’ periodic drives to snuff
out those who do not fit the bill have riddled our times. It is not easy to dissociate ‘nation
construction’ from bouts of exclusionary, territorialising force. Nor have matters improved
with the vaunted dwindling of the nation-state in favour of emerging transnational links
and global networks.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt probed earlier phases of South
African history to unpack nation, race and violence – the mentality that prepared the
ground for Auschwitz. She saw ‘work-labour-action’ as the means for transcending brute
material life – hard slog as a humanising process that spawned the capacity to imagine
and fashion commonality and civic purpose. In her story, however, southern Africa’s
indigenous inhabitants come off badly. Depicted as feckless and work-shy, they are seen
as mired in ‘living in the wild’, incapable of rising above instinctual life in order to mould
a world according to higher ideals. They are condemned to fall by the wayside as stalwart
nation-builders march on.

At odds with Arendt’s dialectic, Santu Mofokeng casts a cold eye on the labour routines of
the century’s “shadowed grounds”: the concentration camps of the South African (Anglo-
Boer) War, Robben Island, Holocaust zones, reservations, the “Bantustans”, the Balkans,
Cambodia, Rwanda and the like telescope to sum up the century’s logic of extermination
and death-work in the name of nation-building. His Self-portrait at Auschwitz (1997) speaks
back to Arendt – to the cruel irony that the work-labour-action she championed washes
up as the motto (“Arbeit Macht Frei”) cynically emblazoned over the death-camp gates. It
resonates with his image of the slogan at Robben Island – “Ons Dien Met Trots” [“We Serve
With Pride”] (2002). His photographs put a critical gloss on work as a totalitarian force,
—in the process highlighting the limits of Arendt’s exalted view of it. He gives us a strand
of ‘thinking through the visual’ and its associative logic that is germane to Visual Century.

It is, not unlike art practice itself, about plunging into the unknown, turning over
experiences, thoughts and feelings that are often not yet acceptable lines of enquiry or
epistemic objects for academic thinking. It brings to light new, often-unpalatable notions
– for example, ideas of difference and diversity that are beyond the ken of the Rainbow
nation. In his film District 9 (2009), among other concerns, Neill Blomkamp probes our
‘speciesism’ – human beastliness towards non-human species and other creatural life,
towards aliens stigmatised as “Prawns”. Zanele Muholi’s deadpan mug-shots of those who
have been beaten up or sworn at simply because they look different also touch on attitudes
hard to square with the claims made for the Rainbow. We might try to fathom things with a
striking remark by Zanele’s companion: “Apartheid het definitely scars gelaat” [“Apartheid
definitely left scars”]. We are brought up short before bodies, identities, sexualities for
which the label “queer” is imprisoning.

Against the xenocidal drives that riddle the Rainbow today, quite another image flares
up in the unlikely quarters of the World Cup Stadiums, 2010. The air is thick with the parp
of vuvuzelas – random, non-notational, uncontainable spasms of sonic stuff. From this
image, dare we take the sound of the possible creative open-endedness of a coming South
Africa-in-the-world?

Sarat Maharaj
INTRODUCTION

CHARTING PATHWAYS
IN AN ERA OF POSTS

Ma n d is i M a javu an d M ar io P is sar r a
I ntr o d ucti o n M andisi M ajavu and M ario P issarra 3

This volume commences at a time of tumultuous change, a moment when conditions for
making art, nationally and internationally, were profoundly influenced by broader social
and political changes. The 1990s would mark a significant break in South African art,
even if such ruptures can never be absolute, premised as they are on earlier struggles and
unresolved conflicts.

The anti-apartheid struggle, characterised by both international pressure and mass-based


internal resistance, was a critical agent in the death of the apartheid regime. But it took
the end of the Cold War to convince South Africa’s rulers that conditions were favourable
for a negotiated settlement. Thus, on 2 February 1990, President F.W. de Klerk announced
the end of the ban on liberation movement organisations. This introduced a transitional
period that was marked by both optimism and extreme violence. Ultimately the ‘centre’
held, leading to negotiations between the two dominant protagonists, the African
National Congress (ANC) and the National Party, resulting in the country’s first democratic
elections in 1994.

Apart from enabling political change in South Africa, the end of the Cold War heralded a
new international political economy – globalisation. Although the concept of globalisation
was not new at the time, the present version of globalisation1 as a vehicle for a free-market
system is an American invention, according to Waltz (1999). Through globalisation, global
markets and big business have been able to reduce the power of the state, redistributing
it among international financial institutions (Apodaca, 2001).

For the local art world, globalisation arrived along with the end of the cultural boycott. For
the majority of South Africa’s artists, galleries and art historians who functioned outside
of politically connected networks, the boycott had meant isolation from the international
art world. Alternately, it had meant participating in exhibitions in countries sympathetic
to the apartheid regime, or organised by individuals indifferent to or critical of the cultural
boycott.2 Globalisation also coincided with a mushrooming of international biennales,
developed by cities as part of their efforts to attract tourism and to brand themselves
as internationally competitive centres. The number of opportunities for international
exhibitions thus increased with the onset of globalisation, not only for South Africans, but
for artists worldwide.
1 Globalisation may be defined as the inte-
The economic underpinnings of globalisation have also meant that the international art gration of economic markets, dominated
world has come to rely more and more on big corporations for funding.3 Locally, this is by multinational corporations and orches-
apparent in the visible growth of corporate collections that budget-strapped municipal trated by financial institutions such as the
World Bank and the International Mon-
and national art museums can only gaze at in envy, and through corporate sponsorship etary Fund (IMF) (Apodaca, 2001).
of awards and art events. In such cases, a conflation between the particular interests of 2 For an account of international exchange
business and the national interest becomes inevitable. This trend was evident in the early during the period of the cultural boycott,
see Chapter 8 in Volume 3.
1990s when Nedbank sponsored the National Arts Policy Plenary, a civil society initiative 3 For example, Tang notes of Belief, the 2006
that subsequently had a decisive impact on national policy. The early 1990s also saw the Singapore Biennale: “Almost half of the
establishment, predominantly by business interests, of the Arts and Culture Trust, under Biennale’s total budget of SGD 8 million
(approx. USD 5 million) came from private
the nominal patronage of the President of the country, as well as the establishment, with sponsorship, which was itself encouraged
government support, of Business Arts South Africa, an organisation intended to leverage by a two-for-one tax incentive” (2007: 366).
influence for individual businesses, as well as providing support for arts organisations 4 The term “community event” must be quali-
fied – under apartheid, the Grahamstown
and practitioners. Festival was routinely boycotted by the local
black community and cultural activists for
The conflation of business interests and the national interest that occurs in the space its celebration of “Settler culture”, under-
lined by its origins as a project of the 1820
vacated by the public sector is also evident in the evolution of the Grahamstown Festival, Settlers Foundation, which, ironically, has
originally a community event, to the Standard Bank National Arts Festival.4 The regular survived the transformation of the festival.
4 VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Figure 1. Tony Molebatsi Nkotsi: Conflict,


1991. Aquatint, crayon-resist etching,
charcoal, 101 × 123.5 cm. Standard Bank
African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum),
Johannesburg.
I ntr o d ucti o n M andisi M ajavu and M ario P issarra 5

support of this event by a statutory body, the National Arts Council, also a product of the
new dispensation, endorses the ceding of central public spaces for artistic practice to the
private sector. The art world, starved of support, has at times been opportunistic in its
embrace of business interests. Perhaps the most notorious example is the now defunct
and discredited Kebble Awards, established by the late mining magnate Brett Kebble.
When these awards came into being, Kebble’s reputation was already a matter of concern,
and yet few commentators raised ethical concerns.5

With the economic dimension of the arts providing the dominant rationale for its support
by the private sector, provincial and local governments have adopted a similar approach
by using arts events to rebrand cities and towns. None has done so as boldly as the City of
Johannesburg. Bremner (2000) points out that the rationale behind the regeneration of
the Johannesburg inner city was informed by the city’s desire to style itself as the “Gateway
to Africa”, in the new economic geography of global capitalism. Attempts were therefore
made to present Johannesburg as a “World Class African City” through an emphasis on
the importance of arts and culture: “The annual ‘Arts Alive Festival’ and the short-lived
Johannesburg Biennale were inaugurated. These hoped to capture local and international
cultural imaginations and establish the [Newtown cultural precinct] as a recreational and
cultural theme park...” (Bremner 2000: 189).

The two Johannesburg biennales, Africus (1995) and Trade Routes (1997), were two of
the largest and most prestigious international art exhibitions the country has hosted,
although they differed in many respects.

Africus, the first Johannesburg biennale, was marked by the cultural politics of the 1980s. It
championed inclusivity, democratic structures, art education and outreach. Consequently,
“many participating artists were black, self-taught or informally trained and from
disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds” (Marschall, 1999: 120). This was certainly
a break with the traditionally white-dominated South African art world. David Koloane
nevertheless argues that the biennale represented a lost opportunity to transform South
Africa into the art pulse of southern Africa. He argues that “the very axis of the Biennale
was based outside South Africa, and its emphasis was therefore on things non-African. It
was, in simple terms, a ‘trans-plant’ that did not take into account the sociopolitical reality
of the country, and its ideal did not encompass the African essence” (1996: 56).

Expectations of an “African biennale” were raised with the appointment of Okwui Enwezor,
a Nigerian-born curator resident in the United States, as Artistic Director of the second
Johannesburg biennale. Enwezor rejected the nationalist foundations that underpin
traditional biennials, along with any expectations of a pan-African exhibition.6 Supported
by a team of international curators, Trade Routes addressed globalisation through a series
of exhibitions of contemporary art. Its audience was international-cosmopolitan and
art-literate. As Marschall put it, “Trade Routes was clearly about the integration of South
African art into a global international context” (1999: 124).

Whether Trade Routes was visionary or simply out of touch remains a moot point. Certainly
the rejection of nationalism, in a historical context where a divided country was trying
to unite itself as a nation, did not resonate with most South Africans. Art critic Eddie
Chambers was among those who thought that the local audience and context should
have received priority. He decried the “breathtaking contempt” for the sensibilities and
5 For a rare exception, see Minnaar (2003).
political concerns of black South Africans, noting that the biennale’s publicity materials, 6 See, for example, Araeen’s comments on
the banners and posters put up around Johannesburg, had no resonance with the local how Enwezor failed Africa (2000).
6 VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Figure 2. Wayne Barker: Laager,


1996. Containers arranged in circle,
dimensions variable. Installation view,
Santiago, Chile. First produced as a
response to the perceived exclusion of
local artists from the first Johannesburg
biennale in 1995.

Figure 3. Pauline Mazibuko: Wrong


timing, 2002. Mixed media, 108 × 156 cm.
Artist’s collection.
I ntr o d ucti o n M andisi M ajavu and M ario P issarra 7

audience. He further condemned the fact that “there [was] no black (South) African
curatorial input into this Biennale whatsoever” (1997: 15). Unsurprisingly, Trade Routes
failed to draw in local audiences, and alienated many of those who did attend. Faced with
this scenario, the City of Johannesburg terminated the exhibition prematurely, signalling
the end of its biennale project.

Supporters of the Johanesburg biennale, particularly Trade Routes, usually argue that
it was instrumental in facilitating the entry of several South African artists into the
international arena. Linked to this is its influence in stimulating production of “new
media”, a development which has itself been criticised by, among others, David Koloane,
who dubbed this trend “the new exclusion” (Van Wyk 2004: 23).

Furthermore, the debate on post-national globalism has largely privileged artists in the
diaspora, particularly those who find it relatively easy to enjoy the benefits of globalisation.
This was evident in Trade Routes, and has indeed been a feature of subsequent exhibitions of
contemporary African artists curated by Africans living in the West. Indeed, the experiences
of artists of the African diaspora have been foregrounded as a concern by a new generation
of African-born curators residing in the West, of whom Enwezor is the most prominent.7

A consequence of Africa’s belated embrace in the West has been that, as Araeen has noted:
“The present generation of African artists – those we see in the Dakar Biennale as well as
in international exhibitions – may not feel that there is any need to confront the dominant
system” (2003: 100). However, as Collier has pointed out, it does make sense to ask
critically what post-national globalism means for a continent that “has got the worst of
globalisation, while missing the best” (2003). Can we really talk of post-national globalism
when Africa has failed to integrate into the world economy? Collier writes that Africa is
actively suffering from some of its most important current global encounters.

Amor points out that in the art world, “globalization has all too frequently served to 7 Enwezor has argued that it has become
reinforce dominant paradigms of circulation and to leave conventional institutional urgent to investigate the diasporic forma-
structures intact at least in mainstream U.S. and Western European institutions, where tions that have become part of the post-
colonial experience of African artists and
the multiculturalism of our global village manifests itself through quotas that intervene intellectuals: “We need to investigate the
little in the dynamics of the dominant artistic discourse” (1998: 30). cultural and intellectual productions based
on this experience of diaspora, to explore
how the conditions of exile and expatria-
Instead of uncritically embracing the notion of post-globalism or any other ‘post-ism’, it tion provide new motifs and challenges to
seems sensible to first ask: how do postcolonial and postmodernist theories facilitate the the discourse of Africa in the late twentieth
creative and critical engagement of artists working in Africa? And how do they address century” (1998: 33).
8 The post-apartheid government accepted
the specific challenges faced by the geo-political construct that is Africa? Addressing a “secret $850 million loan from the IMF to
these concerns could be one way of ensuring that African artists develop their own voices, help tide the country over balance of pay-
while still articulating some of the issues facing the continent. This is not to argue that ments difficulties….” (Terreblanche 2002:
96). However, before the IMF would grant
African artists can only develop their own voices by tackling the socio-economic problems the loan to South Africa, the future gov-
of the entire continent. However, the silence in the art world on some of these issues is ernment needed to sign a secret protocol
deafening. Besides, Araeen poses a very important question: when art is “removed from on economic policies of the country. Terre-
blanche writes that in the “‘Statement on
the specificity of the socio-historical forces of Africa and its critical relationship with the economic policies’ agreed with the IMF, the
dominant world, would it not lead African art to naïve and facile ends?” (2003: 100). transitional executive council committed
itself to a neo-liberal, export-oriented eco-
nomic policy, and a ‘redistribution through
It should be pointed out that although political changes have introduced many benefits growth’ strategy.” Further, “as soon as the
for South African artists, of which freedom of expression is perhaps the most notable, ANC’s leaders agreed to the statement,
many artists of colour still find it almost impossible to access art education and training. they were trapped in the formidable web
of the domestic corporate sector and the
According to some critics, this situation is largely attributable to the economic policies8 international financial establishment, rep-
adopted by the post-apartheid South African government – which have done little to resented by the IMF and World Bank.”
8 VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Figure 4. Michael MacGarry: Hu Jintao


and the scramble for Africa, 2007. Jute,
nylon, cotton, wood, enamel, paint,
epoxy, fibreglass mannequin. Artist’s
collection.
I ntr o d ucti o n M andisi M ajavu and M ario P issarra 9

Figure 5. Donovan Ward: Anti-


globalisation Barbie, 2003–2005.
From the series Barbie Bartmann:
Homecoming queen. Polyurethane foam,
acrylic paint, fabric, fabric paint, latex,
polyester resin, wire, elastic cord, glass
and mild steel, height 30 cm. Artist’s
collection.
10 VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Figure 6. Lisa Brice: Sex kitten cheap


cheap, 1993. Mixed media, 160 × 145 cm.
Gallery Frank Haenel, Frankfurt, Germany.
I ntr o d ucti o n M andisi M ajavu and M ario P issarra 11

change the structural inequalities of the distribution of wealth and resources in post-
apartheid South Africa. Instead, the incomes of black households fell by 19% between
1995 and 2000, while the incomes of white households rose by 15%, according to Statistics
South Africa (Bond 2007). Racial inequality, the legacy of apartheid still perpetuated by
capitalist economic policies today, has meant that the post-apartheid art community is
still largely a white world – as far as galleries, institutions and training are concerned, as
pointed out by Goniwe (2003), among others.

While (2003) points out that the same economic policies have created a situation in which
the global art community is dominated by networks formed within a limited number of
world art cities such as New York, Paris and London, as well as a number of “second-order
international nodes” such as Los Angeles, Tokyo, Zürich, Milan and Düsseldorf. These art
cities have become the home of the most influential international dealers, auction houses,
critics and galleries, and act as attractive art centres for aspiring artists and dealers, who
in turn enrich the creative milieu of art schools and galleries in these cities. As While
notes, “New York, and to a lesser extent Paris, London and other centres have succeeded
in establishing a reputation as the home of modern art, giving their dealers and critics
enormous power in making and breaking potential art trends, and thus dictating the
history of art” (2003: 253).

It is thus perhaps not surprising that many leading African curators concentrate on trying
to raise the visibility of contemporary African art within the leading art capitals of the West,
as evidenced in the priority given to the Venice Biennale by the Forum for African Arts, the
organisation that organised Authentic/ExCentric in 2001, curated by Salah Hassan and Olu
Oguibe, and Faultlines in 2003, curated by Gilane Tawadros. Very few such exhibitions are
seen in South Africa. A notable exception was Africa Remix, curated by Simon Njami, which
began its international tour in London in 2004 and concluded in Johannesburg in 2007.

The curatorial merits of Africa Remix aside, what was significant was the symbolism of its
arrival in South Africa, as a flagship of the developing discourse of contemporary African
art. The exhibition may have been narrated for non-African audiences, as it was originally
intended for Paris, London and Tokyo only. However, its final stop in Johannesburg
enhanced local awareness of contemporary African art as a discourse in which South
Africans were integrally present. Also significant was the timing of its arrival, shortly after
the mixed responses to the Picasso and Africa exhibition,9 and following CAPE 07, the
downscaled version of the Cape Africa Platform’s efforts to curate a new type of biennale
of contemporary African art at the foot of the continent. The severe cutting back of Cape 9 The Picasso and Africa exhibition was
shown at the Standard Bank Gallery in
Africa’s project can be partly attributed to the failure of government (municipal, provincial Johannesburg and the Iziko South African
and national) to back what, in South African terms, was an ambitious project. National Gallery (ISANG) in Cape Town. It
was a popular success and drew unprec-
edented numbers of visitors to the ISANG.
The mixed success of these projects, along with an increasing number of self-styled Critics were less impressed. See, for exam-
African projects, highlighted a growing awareness among some within the art community ple, O’Toole (2006).
of the need to develop stronger links with other African countries.10 That this debate was 10 The establishment of the Africa Centre
in Cape Town, the opening of AfroNova
gathering momentum at the foot of the continent a hundred years after Picasso and his gallery in Johannesburg, and the launch
peers began, from a European perspective, to acknowledge the existence of African art, of the Africa South Art Initiative website
highlights just how much still needs to be done in order to integrate the South African art contribute in different ways to this bur-
geoning African-oriented movement. They
world into an international network in which the African continent is an integral part, and were all preceded by The Triangle Network,
not an exotic extra. which has facilitated international cultural
exchange for two decades, including across
African countries, as well as earlier Afri-
What was also significant, in retrospect, was how 2007 marked the end of a degree of canist projects such as the Afrika Cultural
innocence in the advocation of an “African Renaissance”, a clarion call led by the-then Centre.
12 VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Figure 7. Candice Breitz: Rainbow series


#1, 1996. Cibachrome photograph, 152.5 ×
101.5 cm.
I ntr o d ucti o n M andisi M ajavu and M ario P issarra 13

President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. Late in 2008, Mbeki was removed from his position
as President of the ANC, which led to his resignation as the President of the country in 2009.
With Mbeki’s political demise, the notion of the African Renaissance quietly disappeared
from national discourse.

Meanwhile, at grassroots level, 2008 was marked by violent xenophobic attacks, in which
mostly unemployed or desperately poor black South Africans turned on Africans from
other countries. Signs and precedents were there for all to see, but the scale of the 2008
backlash against ‘foreign’ Africans highlighted the fact that the government’s failure
to address the aspirations of historically dispossessed black communities had created
a new class of scapegoats, who bore the brunt of unrealised and frustrated hopes for
transformation. A new kind of popular resistance, in the form of service delivery protests,
as well as new forms of community organisations, known as the “new social movements”,
have also become more visible in the years following those covered in this survey. With
new terrains of struggle emerging, it is too early to tell what role, if any, art will play in
engaging the evolving struggle for human rights.

In Chapter  1, Gavin Jantjes looks critically at the international context in which post-
apartheid South African art gained access to the historically exclusive domains of Western
modernism. Emphasising the importance of cultural infrastructure for training and
professional development, Jantjes criticises the lack of investment in such infrastructure
by the international community, coupled with the failure of the South African government
to implement its noble policies. Consequently, Jantjes highlights the chasm between
international recognition and local neglect, arguing that “the international success of
South African art was not repeated at home”.

If Jantjes’s perspective represents a birds-eye view of South African art, in Chapter 2, Colin
Richards presents an intense vision from the inside. Taking the themes of memory and
history as his cue, Richards argues for the development of a “critical humanism” as a valid
and necessary response to a traumatic past. Examining works by a range of artists, with
particular focus on Sam Nhlengethwa, Nandipha Mntambo, Jane Alexander and Penny
Siopis, Richards argues that “the struggle of becoming fully human is never over”. He
concludes that “inhuman histories, the work of memory, tradition, transition and ‘the
animal’ all speak to the radical human possibilities of everyday living in conditions of
conflict, contradiction, stupefying sensuality and surprise.”

In Chapter 3, Gabeba Baderoon begins from the premise that the body is a landscape on
which history is written. Given exploitative histories where perceptions and classifications
of identity and difference have disempowered black people, particularly women, Baderoon
asks: “How can we look at a figure who has been looked at too much, who has been
betrayed by an invasive gaze?” Focusing mostly on works by Berni Searle and Zanele
Muholi, Baderoon reveals the subtle strategies used to turn black women into active
subjects rather than passive objects.

In Chapter 4, Mgcineni Sobopha provides a panoramic account of artists who have centred
the body in their work, in order to address a wide range of concerns, from questions of
identity and issues of social justice, to aesthetic preoccupations. Incorporating not only
artists working in new media, but also in traditional Western media such as painting
and drawing, Sobopha situates their work within the postcolonial moment, as he
14 VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Figure 8. Ernestine White: Imbumba


yengceba zayo (the sum of its parts),
2004. Gum transfer print and silkscreen
on paper, 222 images, 10.16 × 15.24 cm
each. Artist’s collection.
I ntr o d ucti o n M andisi M ajavu and M ario P issarra 15

simultaneously narrates and questions the ways in which artworks disrupt dominant
ways of looking.

Kathryn Smith, in Chapter 5, sets out to define and map the experimental turn in South
African art, finding it to be “a question of finding and imaginatively using, particularly …
spaces ‘between’. Between where art is made and where it is shown. Between the showing
of art and its acquisition. Between maker and receiver. Between African and Western
notions of form versus idea. Between objects, environments and viewers.” With this model
of experimentalism, Smith poses this challenge: “In addressing the radical nature of such
work … we must consider the extent to which it possesses any significance politically, or
whether the ‘cutting edge’ remains a discourse confined to the art world.”

The question of spaces for art, more specifically public spaces, is addressed by Zayd Minty
in Chapter 6. Like Jantjes and Smith, Minty notes the encroaching influence of business
and the economy. Focusing on projects in Johannesburg’s inner city, he highlights how
public art is increasingly driven by economic imperatives, and he cautions against the
“sterilised” results that can develop as a consequence. In contrast, Minty highlights the
work of the artist-led Joubert Art Project, which he characterises as far more experimental
and relevant to its public. Like Smith, Minty links the experimental to the everyday, and he
emphasises the importance of engaging local communities for artists who aim to address
issues of social justice and inclusion in their work.

In the final chapter, Andries Oliphant begins by outlining the promise of change in
sources as disparate as Albie Sachs’s provocative “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” essay
and the new policies that were developed for arts and culture. Highlighting some of the
successes in addressing change, Oliphant nonetheless acknowledges critical shortfalls,
including the quality of delivery of arts education in schools, as well as the failure of the
tiered systems of government to provide adequate support to community arts centres,
including the many that were established in the post-apartheid dispensation. Oliphant
concludes by arguing that the demographic ‘normalisation’ of South Africa’s art world
will occur concurrently with the deepening of democracy. He also highlights two areas of
increasing influence. The first concerns the ascendancy of science, and the need for artists
to engage with science and technology, whether through exploiting its possibilities or
through critical engagement with it. The second is the need for greater engagement with
art and artists across Africa.

Together, these chapters provide a broad overview of many of the dominant trends in the
period covered by this volume. They comprise both narrative and theoretical approaches,
and include both focused and panoramic perspectives. Like any overview, this one is by
definition partial, its value stemming in good measure from the range of voices included,
and the heterogeneity of the writers’ positions in contemporary discourse. Perhaps its value
will be determined by its ability to stimulate fresh and critical perspectives, disrupting
the reductive orthodoxies that, as Oliphant highlights, either simplify art by reducing it to
mere reflection of its context, or treat it as an autonomous field oblivious to broader issues.
The application of these conceptual binaries has informed the dominant narrative that
distinguishes between the ‘resistance art’ that supposedly dominated South African art in
the 1970s and 1980s, and the ‘post-apartheid’ art that responded to the new conditions of
the 1990s. The extent to which this volume complicates this rupture – in which aesthetics
were apparently of no concern prior to 1990, while post-1990 art was liberated from social
and political concerns – is perhaps the critical question that will ultimately determine its
value, situated as it is within the moment of which it seeks to make sense.
16 VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

Figure 9: Lallitha Jawarihilal: Oh South


Africa you’ve turned my world completely
upside down, 1996. Oil on canvas, 152 ×
168 cm. Iziko South African National
Gallery, Cape Town.
I ntr o d ucti o n M andisi M ajavu and M ario P issarra 17

Figure 10. Kay Hassan: The flight 1,


1995. Mixed media, dimensions variable.
Installation views (gallery and outdoors).
18 VISUAL CENTURY VOLUME 4

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